So when I’m out at the APA I’m meant to say a few words about blogging and philosophy. And I don’t have a great deal to say. For a while I was thinking about trying to run an analogy between philosophy blogging and philosophy conferences. The main point of this would be “See, this is why I’ve got nothing to say – imagine trying to do a talk about the interaction between philosophy and conference going.” Well I imagine some of you could say quite a bit about that, but I certainly couldn’t.
Anyway, I’m struggling even with this because I’m not sure I can make the analogies work. Some parts do fairly well.
* “Fake Barn Country”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Blog/ :: Brown grad student conference (and other grad student conferences)
* “Certain Doubts”:http://www.missouri.edu/~kvanvigj/certain_doubts/ :: Rutgers epistemology conference (and other topical conferences)
* TAR :: APA
What I mean by the last one is that in both there are occasional highlights, but with lots of dreck in between, and everyone shows up because everyone else shows up (the perfect Lewisian convention), and the discussion afterwards is usually more entertaining and informative than the headline papers. Well, that’s pretty unfair to APA conferences I guess, but maybe with a bit of dramatic licence I can make that particular pairing work. If I was being more reasonable/charitable to APA conferences I’d match the APA with the “Leiter Report”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/. (Of course the pre-group Leiter Report was the perfect match for the APA _Eastern_, but now it’s more like the Pacific.)
But are there blogs that are like the “Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference”:http://myweb.facstaff.wwu.edu/nmarkos/BSPC/BSPC7/BSPC7.htm? Or are any conferences like the “vast”:http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/ “majority”:http://mattweiner.net/blog/ “of”:http://www.sapphosbreathing.com/ “great”:http://ideasofimperfection.blogspot.com/ “single”:http://www.umsu.de/wo/ “author”:http://www.logicandlanguage.net/ “blogs”:http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/blog/? Maybe this won’t work as a storyline.